Thornton May has a wonderful insight into how the generations view technology, he says each generation has a different relationship to technology describing it as
“a sixty year old uses a pc; a forty year old needs a pc, always; a twenty year old needs connectivity, always; and to those under twenty an Xbox is technology“
What struck me is how we need to realise that technology itself is not the key part to understanding how the different generations view new technology….it is about how they connect with it, and how they use it in relation to their lives.

A piece of advice for anyone wanting to participate in the social media world. Although it may be tempting to make friends with everyone in the scene, resist, and get out into the world, not just the industry, and talk to people in complimentary and completely different fields.

I know from experience that the social media scene will fall into distinct echo chambers, no matter what happens, and then what happens is we all talk to each other, about the same things. Agreeing, disagreeing, repeating, saying the same thing but using different words. It becomes one big circle of noise.
The only way …read more

I can admit it – I geek out over statistics. I pour over my Google Analytics reports, and I ogle Omniture. I also get a little gooshy over seeing compete.com come out with statistics for social networks as a whole… oh, and my hands down guilty pleasure has got to be all of those Twitter statistics measurement APIs floating about like Twitter Grader and Twinfluence. I can’t help it, deep down, I am a dork.
Compete.com recently released their January 2009 statistics for traffic ranks to the various social networks.

I find this endlessly fascinating. Look at Twitter’s skyrocketing hurtle …read more

Oh, this whole world of social media and social networks and network fatigue is ticking over so very quickly when you’ve been called an influential, anything with -rati at the end of it (digerati, twitterati…), or as I was recently called, Twitistoric.  The cycle of interest, adoption, mastering, abandoning is happening at a mind numbing pace.
Because of that rapid pace, some people are claiming that the Death of the Influentials will happen sooner than later. Some digerati (Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble to name a few) are claiming that the best way to create an internet strategy is to obtain …read more

Every once in a while, I realize that I’ve got a compendium of sites that I look at daily, sometimes to find topics for BuzzNetworker, sometimes just to learn things, but that I don’t always share with you guys. So today, to give you something to read for the weekend while I’m up in Whistler for Word Camp, I’m going to give you a few of my favourite sites.
In no particular order, here’s five of my regulars.
WebWare – Cool Web Apps for Everyone – One of the reasons that I really like this site is because it’s comprehensive coverage of …read more

Buzznetworker has had the privilege of being the top choice for many guest posts, and the quality of the posts we get is astounding. This one, by Dave Macaulay of Aplus.net is certainly no exception.  Dave as been thinking a lot about the ‘Blogosphere’ and has some great insight as to where we’ve been in the past few years and where we’re headed.
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Acme Printing has one. The local historic preservation society has one, too. So does your Aunt Clara. Chances are that at one time or another you’ve read someone’s blog, even regularly. Or maybe you have …read more

Couple of months ago, Geoff Livingston, among many others, including me, waxed philosophically about Personal Brand vs Reputation. There was quite the debate both on Geoff’s site and here. 
I’ve struggled with my own business brand for years, even when I had a strong brand with my PR business. I have always had a billion projects on the go, and they don’t all fit under the umbrella of the PR firm. Some of them downright seem contridictory.
What I ended up doing, was technically, creating a brand for “Colleen Coplick” rather than anything else. I’ve got a site, sure, but much like …read more

You’ve heard every single social media/web 2.0 expert/pundit/blabbermouth/evangelist repeat it ad naseum:
Companies in this new world must be honest and transparent with their publics or face the wrath of their consumers. 
In this case though, the “wrath” might just be mere annoyance. 
Apple said that the reason they were pulling out of MacWorld is because they were scaling back on conferences. The direct quote from their initial release is: “Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris.” 
Speculation about the ‘real reason’ Apple had pulled out was …read more

Recently, I wrote about who owned your online identity, and today, I came across an article about Google et al, and the amount of information they gather as we trip through the internet.
According to Fortune Magazine, “Google & Co. gather a lot of information about you as you surf, including the date and time for your search, your search terms, and your IP address, which is an 11-digit number that identifies your computer and, more important as far as advertisers are concerned, your location.” [source]
At first, I didn’t think much of this. Yeah, ok, so Google (or Yahoo, or …read more

2008 has been a hell of a year, hasn’t it?  The economy went to shit, the automakers asked for a bail out and the States got one hell of a new President. For me, 2008 started out very promising, and then quickly went sideways, and kinda stayed that way for the rest of the year. Kinda rollercoastery.
There were a couple of events and phrases that popped up through the year, that I am hoping were a 2008 phenomenon and will get buried under the passage of time, like the rest of the year, including:
“Rockstar” “Guru” and people just starting out …read more